Don't fall for the hype

Yesterday I attended another university's graduation ceremony, for a friend's son.  While walking across the campus I passed by this:

(The street and trees are not on the other side of the window; they're reflected in the window.)

It's the Hyperstruction Studio.  As near as I can tell, it's a special classroom for interactive teaching.  That's nice as far as it goes, but another page suggests that it's a single room with a lot of staff and technology support.  That's going to be a hard thing to scale up to some sort of "Systemic Transformation" or whatever, seeing as how you can't set up every room in every building to have a special layout and intense support.

The fact that academics feel a need for such special things, with buzzword names, talking about transformation and change in the context of something that is way too expensive to scale, it all speaks to the restlessness that seems to have gripped academia.  It's sad that we are so restless when we have the treasures of ages of knowledge, the tools to double that knowledge in short time, and a generation of students to pass those things along to.  Why so restless?

Incidentally, the home page for the Hyperstruction Studio has no links to the pages I linked above.  I found all of those links via Google.  There is something richly amusing about techno-hype types having such useless home pages.